Inventive Variety of Offerings Around the ‘Plug-In Campfires’

The Inner Ear concert series has given public exposure to members of the resident new music community, just to the left of the usual rock, jazz or classical scenes, who otherwise would have little outlet. It’s been a valiant project, and also an itinerant one, which began one year ago in Santa Monica, then moved to the Culver City dance space known as Conjunctive Points.

Saturday’s multiple-act, round-robin performance was the swan song in that space, and in the new year the series moves on to the next venue, whereabouts as-yet unknown. Where there’s a will, and willing musicians, there’s a space.

Each concert is organized by a separate curator. This time around, the sonically inventive guitarist Nels Cline did the honors, culling a handful of Los Angeles-based experimentalists for an evening dubbed “Plug-In Campfires.” The audience itself was itinerant, moving to catch each act set up in a separate area of the dance studio. Each act also provided its own illumination, from light-up plastic angel and bunny for Bobb Bruno’s guitar and electronics noodling to almost utter darkness for the oddly eloquent feedback fest of Damion Romero’s closing set.

An arc of red Christmas lights was the backdrop for the evening’s centerpiece, an improvisational trio with Cline himself, extended vocalist Bonnie Barnett and guitarist-keyboardist-vocalist Carla Bozulich. A certain roguish charm emerged between Cline’s palette of loopy guitar phrases and closet romantic’s melancholy, Barnett’s supernatural sounds, mock-kvetching and poetic asides, and Bozulich’s understated sound painting.

The improv trio Dead Air, like a deconstructed version of the Tiny Bell Trio, has its own sense of sound painting, with refreshingly delicate dynamics.

There were visual elements in the mix, too, ranging from Carole Kim’s delicately abstract short films, to the sight and sound explosives of the ensemble Kitten Sparkles, combining layered film loops and a slowly building wall of sound. It went on too long, and too aimlessly, but was generally an affable enough wash of irrational, nonlinear data. The same can be said of this offbeat holiday wingding.